Category Archives: Korea

by | 7 July 2004 · 8:39 pm

Lankov on the Fate of North Korean Defectors

NKZone contributor Andrei Lankov’s latest article on North Korea in this week’s Korea Times concerns the Fate of Defectors

In September 1994, a young North Korean named Kim Hyong-dok arrived in Seoul. It was the end of a long trip: he had spent two years trying to secure a passage to the South. He succeeded against all odds and came to Seoul full of expectations.

Two years later Kim Hyong-dok made another escape attempt — this time he was trying to flee back to the North. He was apprehended and jailed, since an attempt to go to North Korea without proper permission is still a crime under South Korean law. In 2001 Kim Hyong-dok — by that time a university graduate and a clerical worker in parliament, remarked: “I shall not escape any more. Utopia does not exist anywhere.” Alas, comprehension of this fact comes to most North Korean defectors with great pain.

North Korean defectors do not fare well in the South. Between one third and one half of them are unemployed, and most others are relegated to low-level unskilled jobs….

Indeed, the heroes of almost all of the “success stories” of the North Korean defectors come from the elite. There is nothing surprising in this. Members of the North Korean upper crust have a good education and possess leadership skills, they know how to learn and how to manage, and last but not least, they have social ambitions.

However, this does not bode well for the future political transition of North Korea. It appears the only leadership material available in the North will be found within the existent elite. The local Party secretaries would become democratically elected mayors, and will avow their loyalty to democracy with the same zeal they once gave to their professions of loyalty to the Great Leader. The secret police operatives will become successful entrepreneurs, and the children of people who sent hundreds of North Koreans to prisons will graduate from the best universities to lead the sons and daughters of their parents’ victims. We have seen it in many other ex-Communist countries.

But what is the alternative? Will it be possible to prosecute all those who played a part in the crimes of the regime? Unlikely: there are far too many of them. And who will become the administrators, teachers, policemen, and engineers in the post-Kim North Korea whenever it arises? And, should unification occur, would not the wholesale replacement of the elite by Southerners be an even greater evil?

I suspect that, when that time comes, smugly superior southern Korean attitudes toward their benighted northern compatriots will resemble smugly superior New England Yankee attitudes toward their benighted southern compatriots–attitudes that still prevail nearly a century and a half after the end of the Civil War! The North will be Korea’s Mississippi for decades after unification. And the supreme irony will be that Koreans up north will soon enough begin to welcome investment from Japanese and American firms, their former external arch-enemies, just as southerners in the U.S. welcomed investment from Japanese and German firms only a few decades after World War II.

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by | 27 June 2004 · 11:11 am

Kim Jong-il: Born in the USSR (as Yuri Kim)

Andrei Lankov’s latest column in his “Another Korea” series in the Korea Times is entitled “Born in the USSR”:

In late November 1945 a Soviet ship arrived at the Korean port of Unggi. Among those disembarking were several women dressed in Soviet military uniforms. Some of them had small children with them. The children spoke Korean and looked Korean, but this was their first encounter with the land of their ancestors. It was how the would-be Dear Leader Chairman Kim Jong-il first saw the country he was to rule half a century later …

The would-be Dear Leader Kim Jong-il was born as Yuri [Ilsungovich?] Kim in a small village of Viatskoe (or Viatsk), not far from the city of Khabarovsk in the then USSR. His birth date is less certain. The official histories allege that he was born on Feb. 15, 1942, but there has been speculation that he is actually a bit older.

The North Korean media never recognized that Kim Jong-il was born on a foreign soil. From the early 1980s official propaganda insisted that he was born in a secret guerrilla camp located on the slopes of the sacred Paektu Mountain (the first such statement appeared in February 1982). This was necessary to present the young boy as a participant in the guerrilla epic, long seen as the spiritual foundation of the North Korean state, and as a pure national leader, untarnished by any undue foreign influences.

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by | 15 June 2004 · 5:22 pm

Conservative Pyongyang vs. Liberal Seoul

New missionaries learned many of their most useful lessons about Korea from their seniors within the mission rather than from Koreans. The seniority system had its advantages. The senior missionaries in P’yôngyang were gifted leaders and planners whose skills had everything to do with the spectacular success of the Presbyterians as a mission. Their character and commitment inspired fierce loyalty in their understudies….

The P’yôngyang “team’s” strict conservatism, however, sometimes led to conflicts with other missionaries. A prime area of disagreement was the Presbyterian Mission’s educational policy. A working document entitled “Our Educational Policy” had been adopted by a majority vote of the mission in 1890, defining the purpose of missionary education as “the gospel for the heathen and education for the Christians.” The mission agreed to support schools for the children of Christian parents, to train them as the church’s next generation of leaders and to give them the social advantage of a modern education. The policy explicitly rejected “general education” as a means of attracting non-Christians to the atmosphere of Christian schools. As the paper’s author put it, “The missionary teacher should be primarily a manufacturer of evangelists, and in so far as he has failed to do this he has failed as a missionary teacher, however successful he may be as an educator.”

This was the policy that was challenged in 1915 when the Government-General of Chosen excluded religious instruction from the curriculum of any school that wanted its graduates’ diplomas recognized by the government for purposes of future employment. At that time, the Northern Presbyterians had voted to close their schools rather than give up religious instruction (a step that turned out to be unnecessary because of the subsequent liberalization of the rule under Governor-General Saito). The vote came in the midst of a bitter dispute between “conservatives” in P’yôngyang and “liberals” in Seoul over what kind of postsecondary education was appropriate in the mission’s program of Christian schooling….

The Seoul faction, led by Horace G. Underwood (Won Du-woo), argued that by maintaining a single college exclusively for pastoral training in P’yôngyang, the mission was neglecting its responsibility to reach the Korean upper crust in the capital. If the brightest young Koreans were so hungry for a modem education that they were willing to leave home, where there was as yet no college, in order to study in Japan, then the church in Korea should take the opportunity to offer instruction in modern subjects under a Christian faculty in the context of Christian college life. If these were to be Korea’s future leaders in secular occupations, Underwood argued, it was important that they be offered Christian college educations. Severance Union Medical College, an institution that taught science, had already succeeded in attracting top Korean students to study medicine in preparation for careers in the Christian occupation of healing. Why not a college to train Korea’s future Christian professionals in other areas as well?

The Seoul college proposal threatened the P’yôngyang missionaries for political reasons as well. As a union institution run by a combination of the Presbyterian, Methodist, and Canadian missions, the new college would be beyond their control. This was clear from the way Horace Underwood was going about promoting his project. His brother John was a member of the Board of Foreign Missions in New York, and between them the Underwood brothers had many powerful friends in the homeland’s church hierarchy: Having made a fortune in the typewriter business, John Underwood was dangling before the Board a designated gift of $25,000 of his own money to purchase the college campus in the Seoul suburb of Yônhi Village. He had recruited allies on the Presbyterian, Methodist, and Canadian mission boards in North America to form an interdenominational consortium that would oversee the Seoul college through an interdenominational Field Board of Managers would answer to New York and not to the missions in Korea.

SOURCE: Living Dangerously in Korea: The Western Experience 1900-1950, by Donald N. Clark (Eastbridge, 2003), pp. 128-132

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by | 14 June 2004 · 1:31 pm

Pyongyang, "Jerusalem of the East"

By the 1920s, the Presbyterian Mission station in P’yôngyang had become the most conspicuous Western installation on the Korean peninsula. The city, which had been called “pagan” and “filthy” by the earliest Western travelers thirty years earlier, had become a beloved hometown for more than a hundred foreigners, from pioneer missionaries to children in the dormitory at Pyeng Yang Foreign School. To the Presbyterians it was a new “Jerusalem,” the queen city of Christianity in Korea. Some of the greatest triumphs of the missionary effort were associated with P’yôngyang. It had been a center of the Great Revival of 1907 that is said to have set the tone for Korean Protestantism for the rest of the century; and by 1925 it was the center of the fastest-growing Christian community in all of East Asia and, some said, the whole world.

Situated on a majestic S-curve of the Taedong River halfway between Seoul and the Manchurian border, P’yôngyang had a distinguished history. Korea Kids at Pyeng Yang Foreign School grew up hearing that it had been founded in the time of Israel’s King David by the Chinese nobleman Kija (Chinese: Ch’i-tzu), whose temple and tomb were among P’yongyang’s prime historical sites and a favorite spot for picnics…. With nearly a hundred men, women, and children, the P’yôngyang Presbyterians outnumbered the city’s Methodists and Catholics and completely overshadowed the city’s foreign business contingent comprised of Russian merchants, a Portuguese trader and his family, and the American employees of the Corn Products Company’s beet sugar refinery across the river.

The story of P’yôngyang as a missionary station began in 1890, when the newly arrived Samuel A. Moffett paid a two-week visit to investigate the possibility of opening evangelistic work there. The following spring, Moffett and his colleague James Scarth Gale visited P’yôngyang again while on a three-month exploratory journey by foot and horseback. They held services in the city but found that people were still “suspicious of foreigners and afraid of Christian books” because of the government’s recently lifted prohibition against Christianity. P’yôngyang remained impenetrable for several years, receiving occasional visits from Seoul-based missionaries who invariably found the local authorities inhospitable. The Presbyterian Mission assigned Samuel Moffett to P’yôngyang as a full-time missionary in November 1893, and, after a rocky beginning that included attempts on his life by neighbors intent on killing the “foreign devil,” he succeeded in buying property and founding a proper mission station in January 1895.

Forty years later, near the end of Moffett’s distinguished career, the 120-acre Presbyterian campus in P’yôngyang boasted a formidable array of modern institutions. These included Sungsil College (also called Union Christian College) and the Anna Davis Industrial Shops where Sungsil College students worked to pay their tuition; the Lula Wells Industrial School for vocational training of abandoned wives and widows; the Presbyterian Theological Seminary training the denomination’ s pastorate for all Korea; Bible institutes for women and men in the laity; secondary academies for boys and girls; Pyeng Yang Foreign School (PYFS), the Union Christian Hospital, and the West Gate Presbyterian Church. Interspersed throughout the compound were Westem-style residences, the homes of the missionaries themselves. Each day; hundreds of people, foreigners and Koreans, worked and studied in the various mission buildings. At intervals, hundreds more converged from the countryside to participate in special meetings, conventions, and church services. All year long, P’yôngyang station teemed with energy; and in many years the entire Northern Presbyterian Mission converged on P’yôngyang from the faraway stations of Taegu, Andong, Ch’ôngju, and Seoul, and the nearer-by stations of Chaeryông, Sônch’ôn, and Kanggye, to have their annual Mission Meeting and, incidentally, to admire the formidable successes of their P’yôngyang brethren.

The vitality of the missionary establishment in P’yôngyang, a medium-sized city of no more than 180,000, made the missionary campus a most conspicuous feature. For the missionaries, life revolved around “the Work,” and everyone in sight was somehow related to it, whether as co-workers, servants, and employees, or potential converts. P’yôngyang was different from Seoul, where there was social contact outside the missionary and church circles. It had fewer diversions, and people tended to talk to each other. The station’s early arrivals had brought theological and cultural beliefs that were part of the revival sweeping American Protestantism in the late nineteenth century. These became the basis for their own teaching and example for the Koreans. And inasmuch as the missionary calling was the ultimate expression of those beliefs, they understood that their own work was of earthshaking importance. As one missionary put it, “Among the full-time professions, the missionary call was often viewed as the highest. This related in part to the degree of personal sacrifice: anyone who would leave home, family, friends, and country to go to a ‘heathen’ country to serve Christ was looked upon with a kind of holy awe usually reserved for saints.”

SOURCE: Living Dangerously in Korea: The Western Experience 1900-1950, by Donald N. Clark (Eastbridge, 2003), pp. 121-125

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by | 5 June 2004 · 12:20 pm

Leigh S. J. Hunt (1854-1933), Adventuresome Capitalist

Iowa State University Library houses a collection of papers from its third president, whose biographical sketch is more than a little intriguing.

Leigh S. J. Hunt was born in Indiana in 1855. He obtained his undergraduate degree through Middlebury College in Vermont via correspondence course. Hunt studied law independently and passed the bar in Indiana. He then taught at public schools in Indiana before moving to Iowa and becoming superintendent of schools at Mt. Pleasant, Iowa (1880) and East Des Moines Independent School District, Des Moines, Iowa (1882). Hunt became the third president (1885) of Iowa State Agricultural College (Iowa State University). His lack of experience and aggressive style of leadership led to conflicts with the students and faculty and he resigned in 1886 after only one year.

Hunt moved to Seattle, Washington, and over the course of his lifetime participated in a wide variety of successful business ventures. He became a newspaper publisher (1886), real estate developer, and president of a bank while in Seattle. Hunt also would operate a gold mine in Korea (1893), grow cotton in Sudan (1904-1910), and eventually pursue mining, agriculture, and land development in Las Vegas, Nevada (1923-1933).

In 1885, Hunt married Jessie Noble (attended Iowa State, 1882) of Des Moines and had two children: Helen and Henry. Leigh Hunt died on October 5, 1933, in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Mr. Hunt made a lasting impression on Seattle.

[In 1887,] while Leigh Hunt, editor and publisher of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, was trailblazing along the ridge of what would be called Capitol Hill, he, by his own description, “fell into a deep communion with nature and under the enchanted spell of her visible forms.” Under the influence of this reverie, Hunt next came across the few marked graves at Washelli. Perhaps dreaming of good copy, the editor claimed that a voice came to him demanding “Dispose of the dead elsewhere; this ground is reserved for the enjoyment of the living.”

Promptly the city obeyed the influential publisher. The graves were moved next door to the Lake View Cemetery and the fresh and free acres were held as a reserve for more “deep communion with nature.” The site was eventually named City Park and in 1901, Volunteer Park, to commemorate the patriotic gang of locals who volunteered to fight in the Spanish-American War of 1898-99.

Donald C. Clark’s Living Dangerously in Korea (Eastbridge, 2003) picks up Hunt’s story from there.

After having left Seattle a pauper in 1894, in 1901 he went back and gave a dinner for his creditors, a party that was described in a local newspaper [Seattle Argus, 8 January 1934]: “At the end of what was probably the finest dinner ever served in this city up to that time, Mr. Hunt made a little speech and delivered to each of his guests an envelope containing a check for the amount of his debt, with interest added.”

Korea is where he made all that money. He happened to be in Shanghai when James Morse of the American Trading Company in Yokohama was there looking for investors in a large-scale gold mining project that Korea’s King Kojong was trying to get underway near Unsan, north of Pyongyang. Although Hunt was broke, he had rich friends, one of whom, New York financier J. Sloat Fassett, was willing to commit $100,000. By the summer of 1897, Hunt and Fassett has bought out Morse’s share for $70,000, and Fassett returned to raise more capital and incorporate their venture as the Oriental Consolidated Mining Company, Inc., of West Virginia.

In 1899, they bought out the King’s share for a combination of cash and annual royalties that came to less than $250,000, in return for which they ended up with “a 40-year, tax-free gold mining concession, complete with its own supplies of labor, timber, and water” (p. 226). By 1901, the newly reorganized OCMC was worth $5 million, and included investors in California (William Randolph Hearst, among others), New York, and London. Hunt and Fassett turned profits of about $2 million each. That’s when Hunt decided he could afford to repay his Seattle creditors.

By the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War, Hunt was investing in cotton ventures in the Sudan. A report in 2001 by the general director of the Sudan Cotton Co. on “stickiness problems in Sudanese cotton” briefly mentions the same Mr. Hunt in its introductory paragraph.

Cotton production in the Sudan has its roots as early as 1839 when it was introduced by Mumtaz Basha, a Turkish governor of Tokar district during the Turkish colonial rule in Sudan. In 1904 an American investor (Leigh Hunt) was granted a concession at Zeidab area – subsequently the Sudan plantation syndicate, a private company, was authorized to begin experiment with cotton production in 1911 in Tayba which was to become a nucleus for the prospective Gezira scheme. The construction of Sennar Dam in 1925 signaled the real take off for commercial cotton production in Sudan and in that year 80,000 feddans (virtually acres) were irrigated and expansion of area since then progressed in steady rates in Gezira and alongside Blue Nile and White Nile Banks.

Finally, the University of Nevada at Reno’s Walter Hunsaker Collection adds more detail about Mr. Hunt’s contribution to economic development in Nevada:

Hunt was an educator, president of Ames College in Iowa (1885), publisher of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, head of a Seattle Bank, gold mine operator in Korea, developer of Egypt’s long staple cotton industry, personal advisor to President Theodore Roosevelt during the Russo-Japanese War, and mining developer in the Eldorado Canyon District in Clark County, Nevada. Hunt made and lost several fortunes but always recovered after each loss.

Hunt came to Las Vegas in 1923 in search of health [sic]. He became the largest single land-holder in the Las Vegas area and had plans for extensive development of those holdings stimulated by the growth made possible by the cheap power from the nearby Boulder Dam project. His holdings included both land for housing subdivisions and property along the downtown Las Vegas “strip.” In 1929 he hired Walter S. Hunsaker as his confidential secretary and business agent….

NOTE: Leigh S. J. Hunt is not to be confused with J. H. Leigh Hunt (1774–1859), the English Romantic poet, author of this metrically jarring yet delicately indescribable Rondeau (said to be about Thomas Carlyle’s wife Jane).

Jenny kissed me when we met,

   Jumping from the chair she sat in;

Time, you thief, who love to get

   Sweets into your list, put that in:

Say I’m weary, say I’m sad,

   Say that health and wealth have missed me,

Say I’m growing old, but add,

   Jenny kissed me.

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by | 27 May 2004 · 7:59 pm

The New (Korean) Woman: From Many Lovers to Nun

Andrei Lankov has an article in the 7 January issue of The Korea Times on The Dawn of Modern Korea: The New Woman, in which he profiles the prominent pioneering Korean journalist and writer Kim Won-ju, better known under her Buddhist sobriquet of Kim Il-yop [Iryôp ‘One Leaf’].

She was born in 1896 in what is now North Korea. In spite of her later Buddhist career, she came from a Christian family–like almost all Korean women who received a modern education in the early 1900s. Kim Il-yop studied at a local missionary school and then continued her education at Ewha College–the predecessor of the present-day Ewha Womans University, and a place where a girl could receive the best education available in Korea.

Her parents had a happy marriage, but for years they were plagued by the absence of male heirs. In old Korea this was seen as a disaster. Only when Kim was 14 year old did her mother gave birth to a son. Tragically her mother died the following day, and her infant brother soon after. The death of beloved wife and a much-expected son inflicted a heavy blow on Kim’s father, and he also died soon afterwards.

All these tragedies made Kim sceptical about Christianity. She began to wonder whether Buddhism, with its conception of life as tragedy and suffering, was not closer to the ultimate truth. However, Kim was too young and ambitious to entertain these doubts for long.

After her graduation from Ewha, Kim moved to Japan to continue her education. Her stay in Japan was marked by a stormy love affair with a young Japanese, Oda Seijo. The lovers were going to marry, but both families strongly opposed the match. Neither Koreans nor Japanese looked favorably on mixed marriages (indeed, such unions were surprisingly few). Nonetheless, Kim had a child by Oda. Her son grew up apart and had little interaction with his mother. Eventually he became a famous painter and in his old age retired to a Buddhist monastery–like his mother few decades earlier.

In March 1920, Kim (by that time married) founded the first Korean women’s magazine. It had the telling title of Sinyoja–The New Woman. The year of 1920 was the year when modern Korean journalism was born. The mass uprising of 1919 made the Japanese authorities change their policy in the colony, they allowed the Koreans much more political and cultural freedom. One of the results was the boom in the number of periodicals.

The New Woman was not only the first Korean periodical for a female audience–even if this was revolutionary enough. It was also the first periodical to be edited and published almost exclusively by women. Kim was assisted by a number of early Korean feminists, collectively known as ‘new women.’ Her collaborators included the painter Na Hye-sok and the educator Pak In-dok. Mrs. Billings, an American missionary then residing in Seoul, handled the general management….

The New Woman gave voice to the rising group of Korean women who had a modern education and who did not want to abide by the age-old rules of life. They were rebelling against old conventions, and Kim was one of the most vocal members of this small but prominent group. She wrote a number of articles, poems, and novels in which she advocated women’s freedoms such as access to education and equality before the law. However, her forte was the freedom of love. Kim treated the topic with greater radicalism than most other ‘new women.’ The majority understood ‘free love’ as the right to choose one’s husband, while Kim’s understanding of the concept was much closer to the ideas of the 1960s’ sexual revolution.

Kim lived up to her declarations. The late 1920s were marked by a string of affairs with a number of her famous contemporaries. Among others, the list of Kim’s lovers included Yi Kwang-su, the founding father of modern Korean literature.

Even her interest in Buddhism was greatly stimulated by a love affair–this time with a devoted Buddhist. In the early 1930s, Kim was ordained as a nun and spent most of her long life (she died in 1971) behind the walls of a Buddhist temple.

For more (in English) on Kim Wônju, see Yung-Hee Kim, “A Critique on Traditional Korean Family Institutions: Kim Wônju’s ‘Death of a Girl’,” Korean Studies 23 (1999):24-42

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by | 27 May 2004 · 7:53 pm

The ‘Modern’ Japanese (and Korean) Taisho Woman

Arts & Letters Daily links to an article in the The Chronicle of 21 May 2004 on The ‘Modern’ Japanese Woman during the Taisho era (1912-26) that asks, among other things:

How could one be both Japanese and modern, if modernity is defined as Western? Were modernity and Japaneseness antithetical? Or could individuals and society synthesize some new middle ground? If so, how?

Suppose we transpose this question to Korea, a Japanese colony at that time.

How could one be both Korean and modern, if modernity is defined as Japanese? Were modernity and Koreanness antithetical? Or could individuals and society synthesize some new middle ground? If so, how?

In fact, very few did achieve any middle ground. A small number of talented upper-class female artists achieved some degree of, well, notoriety, only to endure tragic denouements. Choe Chong-Dae profiles one on the poorly edited website of The Korea Times on 16 April 2004 under the headline A Pioneering Woman – Yun Sim-dok.

In the course of the recent history of Korea, many prominent pioneering women duly played significant roles in raising the national consciousness and in advocating women’s rights and freedoms. Women such as Na Hye-sok, a social pioneer, painter and writer (1896-1948), Kim Myong-son, a modern writer, famous for her literary work “Girl With Suspicion” (1896-1951) and Kim Won-ju, a Buddhist nun and great novelist of modern literature (Pen name: Ilyop [or Iryop]; 1896-1971) surfaced in the early 1900s when modern-style schools began to produce educated women.

Back in the ear1y 1920s, at the dawn for modern Korean music and art, Yun Sim-dok (1897-1926) appeared, “out of nowhere”; she was the first woman soprano singer in Korea, and was also an erudite writer, composer and stage actress. Showing the nation what Western vocal music was all about, she captured the hearts of people all across the country. Her outstanding social and academic achievements, dramatic performances and attractive singing voice, fascinated audiences, giving them a unique taste of Korean music that they had never before experienced. As a result, she was loved as the most promising, attractive, and stylish female intellectual in Korea. However, unfortunately, she became a victim of social ostracism and hatred, due to an extra-marital affair with a married man.

Born in Pyongyang in 1897, Yun studied at the Pyongyang Girls’ Middle & High Schools. After graduation from Kyon[g]song Women’s Teaching College in Seoul in 1914, she worked as a primary school teacher in the town of Wonju. Demonstrating great intelligence and unique musical talent from early youth, Yun’s ambition was really devoting herself to becoming a renowned Korean musician. She therefore entered the Music Department of … Tokyo [Imperial] University in 1918 by passing the (Japanese) Homeland Governmental Scholarship Examination, with excellent marks. During her university days in Tokyo, she enjoyed the freedom to read an abundance of Western romantic literature and art and the company of the handsome (male) college students. She was strongly attracted to Kim Wu-jin, who was majoring in English literature and drama at Tokyo’s [W]aseda University, and came from a wealthy and renowned lineage of prominent citizens in Mokpo. Despite the fact Kim was married and had a wife and children at home, in Mokpo, she was fascinated by his personality and his literary acumen. They soon fell in love with each other. After graduating from … Tokyo University, in 1922, Yun worked as a teaching assistant there. Yun asserted the need for Korean women’s self-awakening, for their liberation from men, and for their acquisition of a proper social status….

Sharing overwhelming sorrows and affection, Yun suggested to Kim that they return to Korea. They boarded a passenger ship, sailing from Shimonoseki to nearby Pusan. Watching the vast and silent sea from the deck of the ship on the voyage, she expressed profound emotion by singing “Hymn to Death,” highly reflecting a keen sensitivity, while comparing her loneliness to the ship sailing on the seas. The lyrics of Yun’s song appealed to Kim’s inclinations to cast off the burdens of wealth, love and honor. The sentimental and emotional atmosphere captivated them and induced them to seek in death an ideal “dream world,” transcending reality.

They were impelled to commit suicide, jumping from the deck of the ship into the sea, on the voyage home (it was August 1926). The lovers’ suicide shocked not only Korea but also Japan. The suicide was not a romantic death but a lonely battle cry that could not free its protagonists from pessimism nor the slow pace of societal reform. It was seen as a bold challenge to conventional Confucian society and as a sign of the importance of the need for women to establish a real female identity and of the need for reforms of the social circles in Korea at that time, which of course disapproved of Yun’s liberal love affair.

“Modern” Korean women at the time risked opprobrium not just for being loose women or brazen hussies, but also for rejecting Korean values in favor of Japanese ones, being therefore collaborators with the colonial regime.

For more on Taisho Japan, see Ian Buruma on Ero Guro Nansensu.

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by | 25 May 2004 · 8:12 am

North Korean Archaeology of Convenience

One of the staples of international academic exchanges with North Korea is an archaeological report on the latest discoveries regarding the tomb of Tangun (also romanized as Dangun), the mythical founder of Korea, born in 2333 B.C. to a he-tiger and a she-bear. Tangun’s birth year is the starting point for the Tangun Era (Tanki = Danki) calendar year sequence and the first Korean kingdom, Old Chosôn (Ko Chosun = Go Joseon). The year 2004 C.E. thus equals 4337 T.E. (On the same scale, the mythical Emperor Jimmu didn’t found Japan until 1673 T.E. [= 660 B.C.E.])

Several archaeological discoveries were reported by the (North) Korean Central News Agency in 1998.

Chongam earthen wall surveyed

Pyongyang, January 30 (KCNA) — Survey of historical relics has been deepened in Korea. Authoritative scholars and experts of archaeology, history and folklore recently made a survey of the earthen wall in Chongam-Dong, Taesong District, Pyongyang. The survey team discovered relics and a wall built in the period of King Tangun’s Korea, the first ancient state of Korea which existed some 5,000 years ago. The wall has two storeys. The lower storey of the wall, built in the Tangun Korea period, is about 10 metres wide at the bottom and 2.5 metres high. The upper storey, built in the Koguryo period, was rebuilt three times. A scimetar, stone spear, broken top-shape vessels and other relics of the neolithic and bronze ages were discovered in the earth of the wall. Found in the western part inside the wall were the coundation of a building, roof tiles, etc. Dating back to the Koguryo period. A mural painting of the Koguryo period was discovered for the first time in Korea. The mural painting is characterized by use of much powdered gold. The survey of the wall helps systematize the history of Tangun Korea and Koguryo in a scientific way and clearly proves that the history and culture of the Korean nation has developed from long ago with Pyongyang as the centre. [emphasis added]

Newly-discovered wall of ancient Korea

Pyongyang, August 10 (KCNA) — The Archaeology Institute of the Academy of Social Sciences of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea has recently discovered a wall of Tangun’s Korea (ancient Korea). The newly-discovered wall is the west wall in the middle of the walled city of Pyongyang= It was built on a ridge of Ansan in Pyongchon district with no buildings. The wall was a mixture of earth and stone piled up on rocky layer. It has two parts. In the lower part the wall is 11 metres in bedwidth and 1.5 metres high. In the upper part it is 8 metres in bedwidth and 2.5 metres high. The outside of the wall has a steep slope and the inside an easy one. The building of the lower part of the wall is based on a method of construction widely used in the beginning of ancient times. The method is similar to the methods of construction used in the building of the lower parts of the earthen walls in Jithap-ri and Songhyon-ri. The two earthen walls date back to Tangun’s Korea. The recently-discovered wall proves that from the initial stage of state building the people of ancient Korea concentrated on the defence of the capital of the country. It is of weighty importance in the study of the walled capital of Tangun’s Korea. Relics of ancient Korea were also discovered during the recent unearthing of the wall. [emphasis added]

Rather convenient, eh? And not just for North Korea. There are plenty of archchauvinists among South Korean academics to lend whatever respectability they might add. (Is it fair to assume that ‘academic’ does not necessarily imply ‘scholar’?) Here’s a report about a North-South conference in 2003.

Second Joint Scientific Symposium on Tangun and Kojoson

Pyongyang, October 3 (KCNA) — The second joint scientific symposium on Tangun and Kojoson (ancient Korea) took place at the People’s Palace of Culture on Oct. 2. Present there were Ryu Mi Yong, chairperson of the Council for the Reunification of Tangun’s Nation, Kim Jong Yong, vice-president of the Academy of Social Sciences, social scientists and university teachers in Pyongyang.

Also on hand were academic figures of the south side including Honorary Chairman Kim Jong Bae and Chairman Yun Nae Hyon of the Tangun Society who came to participate in the joint national function commemorating the Foundation Day of Korea.

Presented to the symposium were achievements made by many historians in the north and the south in the studies of documents and archaeological excavation by deepening researches into Tangun and Kojoson over the past one year. Academic issues were also discussed.

Historians of the north said that the excavation of the tomb of King Tangun was a historic event which confirmed the Korean nation being a homogeneous nation rare to be seen with the same blood, language, culture and history with Tangun as its ancestor. They proved that the area of Pyongyang is the cradle of the culture of Kojoson.

Historians from the south reviewed achievements made by historical circles in the north and the south in the studies of Tangun and Kojoson and said it has been proved through Koguryo mural tombs that the Korean nation is descendants of Tangun.

The speakers stressed the need for the historians of the two parts of the country to deepen joint academic studies of Tangun and Kojoson that had a great influence on the development of national history.

A joint press release of the symposium was adopted.

According to it, the historians of the north and the south shared the same view that the Korean nation is a homogeneous nation with Tangun as its founding ancestor, a resourceful nation that went over to a civilized society in the earliest period in the East to create an excellent national culture and that Kojoson was the first ancient state of the Korean nation and a powerful and independent sovereign state that displayed its grand sight as a civilized state in the East.

They also reached consensus on the need to conduct brisk academic exchange, solidarity and cooperation to glorify the national history spanning five thousand years, preserve the fine national character and keep the commonness of the nation and turn out actively for the solidarity and unity of the intellectuals of the north, the south and abroad and for the great unity of the whole nation and national reunification in accordance with the idea of “By our nation itself”. [emphasis added]

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by | 21 May 2004 · 10:39 pm

The Role of "Manchukuo Candidates" in the Postwar Period

Many of the principal architects of Japanese and Korean economic development after World War II got their start in Manchukuo. Among them were:

  • Japanese Prime Minister Kishi Nobusuke, who served as industrial czar in Manchuria

  • Japanese Prime Minister Tanaka Kakuei, who served in the Morioka Cavalry in Manchuria, and his later nemesis Fukuda Takeo, who eventually toppled Tanaka from power. Tanaka’s outspoken daughter Makiko served as current Japanese Prime Minister Koizumi’s first foreign minister.

  • Japanese Lt. Okamoto Minoru (Park Chung-hee), the father of the South Korean chaebôl (= Jp. zaibatsu)

  • North Korea’s “Great Leader” Kim Il-sung, who got his start as a guerrilla leader in Manchuria

  • North Korea’s “Dear Leader” Kim Chong-il, who was born in Khabarovsk after his father was chased out of Manchuria

Columbia historian Charles K. Armstrong addresses the role of Manchuria in North Korean mythology in a fascinating article entitled “Centering the Periphery: Manchurian Exile(s) and the North Korean State,” in Korean Studies 19: 1-16:

Kim Il Sung and other Manchurian guerrilla veterans who came to dominate North Korean politics after 1945 were profoundly influenced by the experience of their anti-Japanese struggle in exile. This influence has shaped the ideology, historiography, and domestic and external policies of the DPRK to the present. At the same time, this exile experience has been given a mythical status in North Korean history, centered on the personality and activities of Kim Il Sung, but reflective of earlier attempts to draw Manchuria into the mainstream of Korean history. The “mythification” of Manchuria has grown steadily over time, and since the early 1970s Kim Jong Il has been closely associated with his father’s Manchurian guerrilla struggle, in particular with the image of Mt. Paektu.

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by | 16 May 2004 · 10:16 pm

Korea’s Occupier-in-Chief, Gen. Hodge (Podge)

Compare the general in charge of U.S. occupation policy in Japan with his hapless counterpart in Korea.

Lt. Gen. John Reed Hodge was one of the most important people in recent Korean history. He served as the commander of the U.S. military occupation of southern Korea from September 1945 to August 1948, although he was far from being a prominent U.S. Army officer during World War II. His personal and professional background had a direct and negative impact on his implementation of instructions and his dealings with the Korean people and their political leaders. This article provides evidence that President Harry S. Truman’s decision to appoint Hodge as occupation commander was a serious mistake. His narrow experience and lesser command responsibilities caused him to make decisions that greatly increased political polarization in the divided country, creating the circumstances that would result in the outbreak of the Korean War.

SOURCE: James I. Matray, “Hodge Podge: American Occupation Policy in Korea, 1945-1948,” Korean Studies 19: 17-38

More on KimSoft and in Army Magazine. To quote the latter:

Japanese forces in Korea formally surrendered to Lt. Gen. John R. Hodge, the American corps commander, on September 9, 1945. Hodge was then appointed the commander of U.S. Armed Forces in Korea and tasked with the restoration of Korean independence.

In hopes of maintaining civil order, Gen. Hodge kept Japanese officials in charge of Korean civilian affairs. It was a mistake, and his statements and actions led to rioting in the south. To restore peace, Syngman Rhee, the exiled leader of Korea’s independence movement, was asked to return to his home country. Rhee, a nationalist since his days as a student in Seoul, had been jailed and tortured for his views. He escaped from Japanese-occupied Korea to Shanghai and set up the Korean Provisional Government. He was eventually elected president of the Republic of Korea.

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